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“Did you know that sharks never get sick?” said Starsky in the wowed, excited voice he always got whenever he learned some new but essentially useless fact.
Hutch stifled a sigh and shifted in his seat. The two detectives were in the front of his LTD, watching a warehouse for signs of life, i.e., a numbers racket allegedly being run there by a disgusting, sleazy man named Cassius Bowles. They didn’t have quite enough on him yet to make an arrest, so they were hoping to catch one of his runners making a delivery of the numbers slips to Bowles, who was holed up at the warehouse. The stakeout, so far, had produced nada and the summer heat was starting to get to Hutch who had all the car’s windows rolled down and his green t-shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders. His partner was also sweaty, but the heat didn’t seem to get to him quite as bad as it did Hutch.
To pass the time, Starsky had brought along one of his trivia books and was reading aloud from it. The constant dissemination of facts from his partner’s lips was annoying Hutch, who’d much rather concentrate on the warehouse than hear the rambling dribble of a bunch of disparate facts that held no particular interest for him.
“Fascinating,” Hutch drawled at Starsky’s latest pronouncement, meaning the opposite.
Starsky wriggled happily and turned the page, eyes hungrily scanning the words. They widened a bit after the next few sentences and he pointed a finger at the book, asking without turning to look at his partner, “Did you know that the average person will, over the course of his or her lifetime, grow about 590 miles of hair?”
Hutch gave in to the sigh this time. “Starsk,” he said, “what’s it matter?” Although his mind automatically pictured Starsky’s curls growing out to said epic proportions and his brain did a little "urk!"
Starsky turned a blank look at him and replied, “These things matter Hutch. It all matters.” He waved the book in his hands.
“We’ve got a job to do here,” Hutch pointed out with a jab of his hand at the warehouse across the trash-strewn street.
“I know that, but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve our knowledge base while we’re waiting,” said Starsky. Hutch made a face. Starsky returned to his book.
A couple minutes later, he spoke up again. “Did you know,” he said and raised a finger in the air, “that women are four times more likely to shoplift than men are? Isn’t that interesting? Plus it’s pertinent to our job.” He gave Hutch a wink even as Hutch rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath, “Did you know that you’re a pain in the ass?”
“What was that?” asked Starsky.
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything,” said Hutch lightly and flashed a tight smile at his partner. Starsky gave him a suspicious look before burying his nose back into his book of trivia.
“Will you cut that out!” Hutch snapped a few moments later when Starsky’s reading sub-vocalizations got on his nerves.
“Sheesh! What crawled up your keister and died?” demanded Starsky as this time he gave his partner a wary look and leaned away from him. Hutch huffed and mumbled an apology that was only partly sincere. He wiped a hand across his sweating brow and looked at the offending moisture before drying his hand on the leg of his jeans.
Then he spread his hands and explained as patiently as he could, which wasn’t very, that he just wanted the damned stakeout to be over so that they could book their quarry and go home.
“I know how you feel, babe,” commiserated Starsky and stared at the warehouse for a few seconds before letting his eyes fall on the open book in his hands. “Ooh! Hey, did you know an adult lion’s roar can be heard from five miles away?!”
“I’ll remember that next time I go on safari,” Hutch grumbled.
“Aw, you’re no fun,” pouted Starsky, but Hutch’s nasty demeanor didn’t remove any of the enthusiasm Starsky had for learning new stuff. He delved into the book again, flipping past some pages with longer explanations about the random subjects therein. At his next, “Did you know…?” Hutch snapped at him again.
“No, I did not know and I don’t care!”
“…that a cucumber is 96 percent water,” concluded Starsky, ignoring his partner’s outburst and the frustrated growl that followed. Hutch narrowed his eyes at Starsky when he saw Starsky’s lips twitch in humor and silently vowed to get back at Starsky some way, some how, for forcing him to listen to this encyclopedia-like recitation while having him trapped in a hot car in 90-plus degree heat. Honestly, he felt as though he were drowning in his own sweat.
Starsky flipped to the next page. Hutch struggled not to strangle his partner. The warehouse remained still and no lights or movement could be seen in the few windows in its façade. A shimmer of heat caused by the city-pollution haze created the illusion that they were looking at the warehouse through a body of water. Water. Cool, refreshing water, thought Hutch, and cursed the fact that all they’d brought with them was coffee and they’d drunk that long ago.
“Did you know,” began Starsky in a low, mysterious voice, “that when you lick a stamp, you consume one-tenth of a calorie?”
“Starsky!” snarled Hutch through clenched teeth. His hands tightened into fists at his sides and he had to force himself to remain on his side of the car. “I don’t want to hear any more of your stupid facts! All right?! We are here to catch Bowles in the act and we can’t do that if you’re sitting here distracting both of us with that… that drivel! So knock it off and put the book down!”
Hutch felt a pang in his chest at the hurt look that Starsky gave him just then but brushed it off, knowing that he was justified in his anger. If they missed this bust, they might not have another chance to catch Bowles in the act. Without a word, Starsky marked his place in the book by folding down the corner of the page he was on and set it down by his feet. Then he straightened in his seat and stared out the windshield through dusty, late-afternoon light, silent as the grave.
Time ticked by. The only sounds in the car were the occasional shuffle of feet and butts as the detectives shifted to a more comfortable position or the intermittent sighs and coughs and throat clearings of normal human respiration. Occasionally, traffic noises from the surrounding streets intruded on their individual thoughts, but neither one of them said a word. At one point, Starsky inhaled what sounded like a massive amount of snot, like he’d woken up with a cold.
“Allergies,” commented Hutch in commiseration.
“Not sure what it is,” said Starsky somewhat nasally without looking to his left.
More silence followed.
Finally, when Hutch was just about to check the time by Starsky’s watch to see how close they were to their shift change, Starsky broke the silence again.
“Did you know,” he began quietly and Hutch groaned internally, prepared to have some bizarre tidbit about the human body or the price of eggs in Argentina in the 1840s or how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop foisted upon him. Instead, he was floored by the next words that came out of his partner’s mouth. “Did you know… that I love you very much, more than anything or anybody else in this world?”
Hutch stared. Blinked and stared.
Starsky turned his head toward him and, with a little smile and a hopeful look on his face, said, “How’s that for trivia, huh?”
“Oh, Starsk!” breathed Hutch and in that hot front seat in the middle of a dying August day while they waited for nothing at all of import to happen across the way, two men found themselves in each other’s arms, sharing a blistering kiss filled with all the knowledge they needed in the world, and that was simply that they were meant for each other. (Put that one in your trivia books.)
End